As the world becomes increasingly wired, more and more people are craving ways to connect more directly with nature and one another. Facebook and other social networking sites have suffered mass defections by members who have found virtual friendships no substitute for real-life relationships. The Slow Food movement now has more than 100,000 adherents in 132 countries. It is probably no coincidence that all this is happening as the world’s economy and ecology have shown themselves increasingly fragile.

The disjunction between our material culture and the resources exploited to support it is beautifully illustrated in Christien Meindertsmas award-winning book Pig 05049, which catalogues the astonishing number and types of products — from heart valves to hair conditioner — into which a single pig is transformed. But the rift can be bridged without adopting a Luddite attitude toward consumption. In fact, we propose that the perfect intermediary is design. With that in mind, Modern Painters inaugural Re:Vision Design Award is a call to arms to consider how this discipline can be applied to making our homes more efficient, sustainable, emotionally comforting, and beautiful. We focused on the home in an effort to act locally while thinking globally and restricted candidates to the under-40 set to encourage young talent to stay the ecologically and socially responsible course.

For the difficult task of selecting the best among our outstanding candidates — 120 lighting, product, interior, and environmental designers from more than 20 countries — we enlisted a distinguished panel of jurors that included designer Ross Lovegrove; Droog cofounder Renny Ramakers; the Museum of Arts and Designs chief curator David Revere McFadden; furniture maker and Rhode Island School of Design professor Rosanne Somerson; gallerist Cristina Grajales; and the founder of Design Within Reach and the newly launched bicycle company Public, Rob Forbes.

Modern Painters presents the winner of our first Re:Vision Design Award, Atelier NL (Nadine Sterk and Lonny van Ryswyck) of Eindhoven, the Netherlands, which received a prize of $10,000, and the runners-up, ID Modus (Pegah Ghalamber and Jan Hormann) of Cologne, Germany, and Rochus Jacob of San Francisco, who each received $2,500.

Ramakers identifies three themes uniting the winning project and the runners-up — "the drive to functionality and simplicity, greater social awareness, and a focus on sources and processes in a local context" — which she sees as working against mindless consumption. Grajales adds that "the economic pressures of the past few years have made us more aware of all the consequences of our actions." And Somerson points out that "all three finalists presented a context for the work, demonstrating a conceptual process that extends the life of the object or product into either the environment or through the implications of its manufacture."

Manufacture is no small concern for designers, who are increasingly left to their own devices to get their ideas realized, as well to distribute the finished products. This development has led many to adopt a work model similar to that employed by artists. As this trend progresses, the Re:Vision Award will seek out those whose designs best improve the art of living. We also hope to witness the opposite: more mainstream manufacturers taking the position that sustainability and social responsibility are intrinsic to good design.

The winner of the 2010 Re:Vision Design Award is Atelier NL for Drawn from Clay, a collection of pottery made using clay from different regions, or polders, of the Netherlands, whose varying textures and shades are allowed to come to the fore. "I love that they are working in the most basic element yet seeing it in a different way. I had never looked at earth as having memories," says Grajales, who notes that if anything positive has come from the current recession it is the calling into question of hyperconsumption: Suddenly, we’re forced to reconsider how we use our natural resources.

The firm’s partners, Nadine Sterk and Lonny van Ryswyck, met in 1999 at the Design Academy Eindhoven. They were both enrolled in the atelier department, which was founded by Hella Jongerius, herself an Eindhoven grad and an early Droog member known for quirky work that straddles craft and design, low and high tech. The two students traveled together to Brazil and Peru to research those countries’ pottery traditions. When it came time to declare a thesis project, that overseas journey came rushing back as an epiphany. "Those ceramics really felt Peruvian because the ceramists got the clay from the ground next to their workshops," Sterk remembers. "Looking at our own kitchenware, it was all identical. It said nothing about our identity. We went to a crafts shop and asked if it carried Dutch clay. They didn’t sell it anymore. There were some river clays, but they had no idea where they came from. Then a whole world opened up."

After graduation, Sterk and Van Ryswyck continued to explore this world through Atelier NL, which they launched in 2006. They obtain the material for their Drawn from Clay pieces by studying geological soil maps, donning boots, knocking on farmers’ and others’ doors, and with the landowners’ permission, shoveling up one bucket of earth from here and another from there. After traveling all over the Netherlands, the two have become mud experts of sorts, discovering that the country boasts 14 different clays, each with its own story. Ancient Romans had identified one type, from southern Holland, as perfect for making roof tiles. Another variety, from the north, has a yellowish color that indicates high chalk content, suggesting that it washed over from the cliffs of Dover and Normandy during the Last Glacial Maximum.

In the 19th century, Dutch brick factories were sited above huge clay deposits in cities like Tegelen, but this industry largely collapsed in the mid 20th century. Dutch makers of ceramic tiles and tableware have mostly disappeared, too, except for a few like the venerated Royal Tichelaar Makkum, which has expanded recently into luxury and design products.

"What I really like about this material is that so many details, so much history, jump out from a little piece of soil," Sterk says. "The surviving brick factories still use natural clay, but they mix it with all different minerals to get the perfect color." Because of this homogenization, plus the prevalence of white-glazed porcelain, we tend to forget that ceramics are made of earth or that towns and nations have forged identities through architecture, tools, and tableware whose peculiar characteristics owe much to the dirt beneath the inhabitants’ feet. This "revaluing locality" appealed greatly to Ramakers, who appreciates the studio’s efforts to show that "even the earth of a Dutch polder can differ in color and texture."

To make workable clay for the project, the designers used a mashing tool, coffee grinder, and drill to dry, grind, and sift soil, which they then mixed with water and kneaded. They called their apparatus the Clay Machine. Demand for their tableware has prompted the pair to adopt machines better suited to the task. But their finished pieces — made by packing clay into a mold, a technique that lies somewhere between hand throwing and casting — still have a primitive appearance. "We looked at very different ceramic forms through the centuries, and we were fascinated by medieval shapes," Sterk says. The plain outlines are simultaneously rustic — a subtle evocation of the locavore movement, perhaps — and modernist. Their simplicity makes it easier to appreciate the material’s varying textures and colors, like the frosty yellow of the clay from Brunssum and the rough terra-cotta of that from Gilze-Rijen.

Besides better machinery, Drawn from Clay has yielded spin-off collections, including Polderceramics, made using 80 buckets taken from the Noordoostpolder. The pieces combine archaic forms with contemporary elements, such as pewter handles and glass rims, resulting in peculiar hybrids that betray the unmistakable Dutch sense of the absurd.

"There’s a place for extravagance and ornament, and there’s a place for simplicity. Since this was a design competition ostensibly dedicated to things that people would use and live with, simplicity was my guideline," says McFadden. "I like Drawn from Clay’s modest quality, but I would also love to see what a completely set table would look like."

McFadden will get his wish: Royal Tichelaar Makkum has commissioned Atelier NL to create a tableware collection that features six local clays and a variety of glazed surfaces.

Among her judging criteria, Somerson lists original thought, materiality, and formal resolution. But when two entries exemplified those qualities equally, the tiebreaker was "a sense of humor or sensitivity to other character traits that make us human." The Klappwand by ID Modus is refreshingly clever, efficiently providing storage while nurturing the human desire to play. A vertical arrangement of numerous different-size flat panels, the piece looks like a spiffed-up decorative masonry wall or a blanched 3-D Mondrian. Things become interesting when you start to flip the panels out, Murphy bed-style, to form a work surface, shelving, and even seating.

The concept was born when ID Modus’s founding partners, Pegah Ghalambor and Jan Hormann, were classmates at the University of Applied Science of Architecture, in Aachen, Germany. "The wall is always a border of a space, but how can it also become more part of an interior?" Hormann remembers asking himself. Ghalambor adds that cramped city living requires a solution like a Klappwand. One could easily imagine new college graduates picking up the modular all-in-one unit at their local Ikea and installing it in a home office or studio.

The young architects — both a mere 28 — are developing Klappwand with two other former classmates, Shaghayegh Hamidi and Lars Reynolds, in hopes of finding a manufacturer to produce it. Already, though, this prototype has caught the attention of the design world, changing Ghalambor’s and Hormann’s lives in the process. In October, Klappwand won two prizes at Blickfang Vienna, organized by the Austrian Museum of Applied Arts/Contemporary Art, giving the partners the encouragement they needed to establish their studio last year.

While Atelier NL’s Drawn from Clay weds high concept to craft and ID Modus’s Klappwand innovates on the home-furnishing front, the San Francisco-based Rochus Jacob’s Thermodynamic Cooler is a triumph of industrial design. With its smooth, white ceramic shell and sleek, snug-fitting lid, the prototype looks as smart as a salad spinner or food-storage container one might find at Crate & Barrel or Williams-Sonoma. The unit acts as a zero-energy refrigerator or cold pantry, cooling food without electricity. A clay pot nestles within the outer vessel, and the space between is filled with glass foam soaked with water that evaporates to chill the inner pot; when the water level is low, a green indicator reminds users it’s time for a refill. It weighs in at under six pounds.

The Thermodynamic Cooler adapts an ancient African storage technique that was recently updated by the Nigerian teacher Mohammed Bah Abba, who patented his Pot-in-Pot in 1995 and has since distributed almost 100,000 of his minirefrigerators among needy Africans. (In 2000 he won the Rolex Award for Enterprise.) Jacob substitutes glass foam for Bah Abba’s sand, because it is more absorptive and lighter. "I love the fact that it doesn’t impose our technology on others but that we are learning from Africa," Grajales says.

In Africa, Bah Abba’s pots are essential to many people’s survival. Jacob’s version, on the other hand, may improve a modern urban dweller’s standard of living without straining the electricity grid.

"Re:Vision DESIGN Award" originally appeared in the May 2010 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' May 2010 Table of Contents.